Tag: relegation

adventures in british football: too. many. freakin’. games.

How on earth is a Premier League fan supposed to live life — work, cleanse one’s body, feed it on occasion, and, oh, I dunno, sleep a wee bit — when there are all of these games? My God! I simply cannot keep up.

I missed my very first Liverpool Premier League game — the Liverpool-Luton Town draw on Nov. 5, featuring Luis Diaz’s header goal and the flashing of his heartbreaking white tee, “Libertad Para Papa” beneath his jersey for his kidnapped father – because I had the nerve to be traveling at the time. I can hear my Chelsea-mad son’s voice ringing now in my head as I type these words: Plastic fan. Not a true football supporter. (But keep in mind, he only has to take care of himself, which largely consists of going to work, the gym, and Chick-fil-A or Chipotle. I’m sure he would never schedule travel when Chelsea was playing.)

So if you’d like to stop reading and dismiss this entire British football fan odyssey as “performative,” be my guest. I maintain, however, that it’s okay to miss a game now and still call oneself a football fan. Maybe that makes me a phony. Whatever. I’ll own it.

But back to my point: Why do there have to be Premier League games (one game a weekend) AND international play for the Europa League AND have an English Football League (EFL) competition for the Carabao Cup … CONCURRENTLY?

This last competition, the Carabao Cup, befuddles me because the Premier League is already an English football league where 20 teams compete against one another twice each season. Why the hell do they have to compete with MORE British teams? I’m well aware – thanks Welcome to Wrexham, my Chelsea-fan son and his girlfriend Jess – that there’s an abundance of English leagues (see graphic) and that every year, a few teams move up a league (promotion) or down a league (relegation). But that amount of interplay between leagues is apparently insufficient. WE. NEED. MORE. (Reader: No we don’t.) 

Enter the 63-year-old English Football League competition for the Carabao Cup – which doesn’t sound at all British but it’s named after its energy drink producer-sponsor: The Premier League teams compete against their own league’s clubs as well as teams from lower leagues in a seven-round knockout contest. According to the EFL website: “Premier League clubs enter the competition in Round Two with clubs that have qualified for the Champions League or Europa League joining in Round Three. The competition culminates in a final at Wembley Stadium, with the winner qualifying for the subsequent season’s Europa League.” (Okay, my head is spinning.)

And these Carabao Cup games occur at weird times. I was not expecting, for example, that on a random Wednesday (Nov. 1), a Liverpool game would be taking place, in the middle of the workday. A routine morning check of my social media feeds — which include ample Liverpool and Premier League accounts — informed me that there was a 3:45 p.m. game vs Bournemouth that day. (*Bournemouth is a team Liverpool beat 3-1 in August in the Prem and are slated to play again on Jan. 21.*) I was in the middle of preparing for a writing course I teach on Wednesday nights and had to scramble to see if I could get access to our ESPN+ account or whether there was a limit as to how many people could access it at any given time. The fact that I was able to log in means either that there’s no limit or that the other four members of my family were doing other things … like bad football fans. (I didn’t text my football-mad son to ask him because I didn’t want him to know I was unaware of this scheduled match.)

The Carabao Cup game featured torrential downpours. Everyone on the pitch, including the Reds in their lime green and white kits, looked like they’d rather be anywhere else. Liverpool took the early lead with a Harvey Elliott shot on goal that was deflected by the Bournemouth goalie only to be drilled to the back of the net on the rebound by Cody Gatkpo. Early in the second half, Bournemouth evened it up with a goal from Justin Kluivert for whom announcers said this was his first in English football.

While working to create lively and engaging slides for my writing students on one half of the screen, the rainy EFL game played on, ending in a 2-1 win after a Darwin Nunez goal (that dude is on fire these days).

I totally missed Liverpool’s Sunday, Nov. 5 Premier League 1-1 game against Luton Town four days later. (Liverpool had been expected to best “lowly Luton Town,” as Reuters referred to them. Yikes.) I haven’t told my Chelsea-fan son that I missed this game either lest he chastise me for choosing travel over football.

To eliminate future scheduling surprises, I’ve now entered the entire, godforsaken Liverpool schedule into my calendar and empowered my phone to annoy the piss out of me with reminders when kick-off is slated to begin.

This is exhausting, this British football stuff. 

Image credits: William Hill and Colombia.com.

adventures in british football: a 2-nil liverpool win in DAR-bee

Why is the word “derby” pronounced “darby” by Premier League fans and British sports announcers? Why don’t they call it a local rivalry instead of using the word Americans associate with horse racing?

When my Chelsea-fan son kept referring to the Oct. 21 Liverpool match against Everton as a Merseyside “Darby,” I initially thought I misheard him. It was easy enough to think I’d misheard him on the morning of the game seeing as though when I woke for the 7:30 start, I had one of my horrific migraines and felt as though my brain functioning was impeded by thick sludge. (Medicine and coffee helped clear it up by halftime.)

I later learned that there are so many English football teams which play in such close proximity that when they face one another it’s referred to as a derby. (I’ve yet to learn what’s up with the weird pronunciation.) I didn’t realize that Liverpool FC (which stands for Football Club) is not the only Premier League team in Liverpool, England. Less a mile from Anfield, where the Reds play, is Goodison Park, home to the Everton FC. This seems crazy to have two teams with stadiums so close to one another playing in the same league. In New York City — whose population dwarfs Liverpool’s — there are two baseball teams but one plays in the American League (Yankees) and one in the National League (Mets). When they face one another, it’s nicknamed the Subway Series and takes place at one of their stadiums which are roughly seven miles apart. In Chicago, the stadiums of their American League team (White Sox) and their National League team (Cubs) are about eight miles apart.

This Merseyside (the county in which Liverpool is located) rivalry dates back to 1894, according to the Bleacher Report. There was “a falling out between Everton and the owner of Anfield, Mr. John Houlding, in 1892,” the Bleacher Report said. “Having been the original tenants of Anfield, the Blues were forced to move across Stanley Park and found Goodison Park, which remains their home ground today.”

In England, I was shocked to discover that there are seven Premier League teams in London alone. That’s a lot of teams from which to choose. Factor in the practice of relegating teams to lower professional football leagues and promoting teams from lower leagues to higher leagues, and the potential for adjacent neighborhood teams to regularly play one another is high. That’s something around which I’m still trying to wrap my American brain.

My Chelsea-fan son tells me that, in addition to my lack of understanding of the importance of derbies, I likewise don’t really understand the depths of the passion British football team fans have for their clubs. This fervor, he says, pales in comparison to heated American sports rivalries, including the Red Sox-Yankees rivalry which hit its recent apex in the mid-2000s. (This past season the teams were duking it out for last place in the American League East. We’re far removed from the days of on-field fisticuffs of the Jason Varitek-Alex Rodriguez variety. See above pic.)

My son may be entirely right. In U.S. sports, we don’t tend to erect physical barriers between fan sections nor do we mandate that if you’re sitting in the “home team” seats you are prohibited from wearing an opposing team’s gear and colors. (A recent Red Sox-Los Angeles Dodgers game I attended at Fenway Park in late August saw multitudes of Dodgers-gear-wearing fans intermingled with Sox fans as the supremely vocal Dodgers crushed the hometown team.) The realization that the rules are different with professional soccer first hit me years ago when I bought tickets for my Premier League-loving family to see Liverpool play Sevilla in Fenway Park. While online, I had to designate for which team’s section I was seeking tickets. Once I selected Liverpool, there was a disclaimer that ticketholders in that section couldn’t wear Sevilla gear. Part of the reason, I’ve learned (courtesy of my son and the Welcome to Wrexham documentary), is due to the intensity of English football “hooliganism” and the deadly violence that can ensue at international football games is the reason for these protective measures. (I’ll tackle this in a subsequent post.)

However, on the rainy October morning of the Liverpool-Everton match, as I sat on the sofa wearing my candy-apple red Liverpool jersey and blue pajama bottoms bearing multi-colored cartoon sheep and moons, I wasn’t thinking about the intensity of a derby or football hooligans. I could only sip multiple cups of coffee, pop migraine medicine, enjoy the fact that two of my three adult kids were home for a visit, and pray for my head and eyes to stop throbbing.

All I have in my notebook from the scoreless first half of the much-touted derby when my migraine was at its worst, are snatches of conversation like this:

“I like Trent [Alexander-Arnold] with longer hair.”

“Why don’t you send him a letter?”

There were lamentations about Mo Salah’s performance such as, “Salah’s been a dead-end today.”

The banter was as lackluster as the first half which concluded with even the announcers nakedly trying to manifest something interesting to occur.

By the beginning of the second half, my head cleared and the pain was almost gone. I was much more engaged in the game, which really didn’t pick up tempo until the previously proclaimed “dead-end” Salah secured both of Liverpool’s goals. Before those goals (in 75th and 97th minutes), an announcer labeled the match an “unmemorable derby,” adding that it was “crying out for someone to make their mark.”

There was some yellow card action when Liverpool’s Ibrahima Konate practically tackled an Everton player in the 50th minute. Sixteen minutes later, Konate (below) was lucky he wasn’t tagged with a second yellow for running into another Everton player, which would have resulted in a red card and left Liverpool with one fewer player for the remainder of the game. (Everton fans and its coach vigorously protested the call. Liverpool coach Jurgen Klopp pulled Konate immediately after Everton’s failed free kick to avoid just such a scenario.)

My Chelsea-mad son (who currently lives with us) didn’t join the rest of the family until the 69th minute, after Darwin Nunez took the field. “I only came downstairs because [Jurgen] Klopp stopped his anti-Darwin hate campaign,” he said while sporting a cobalt blue Chelsea jersey amid the sea of Liverpool gear on everyone else.

Two plays went to VAR (video assistant referee), but, unlike with the Tottenham game, these calls went in Liverpool’s favor, with one leading to a penalty kick which Salah shot into the net to break the nil-nil tie. This seemed to energize the Reds because they got off several more shots on goal — including one by Harvey Elliott that an announcer said “was hit with venom” — as the weather in Liverpool shifted from sunny to a torrential downpour.

After a Darwin breakaway down the pitch, followed by a crisp pass to Salah who sunk it into the goal, time was called and Liverpool won 2-nil.

My headache was gone. I had my three adult children in the same room. Our two dogs were deliriously happy to snuggle up alongside them as the rain fell outside our window, saturating the bright New England foliage. What a great way to start the day … migraine notwithstanding.

Image credits: ESPN, Google, Getty Images via Liverpool.com.

adventures in british football: liverpool at chelsea

As I prepared to watch the first Liverpool game of the new Premier League season this past Sunday, I hoped to do so while donning the brand new Liverpool jersey I ordered in honor of the start of my British football experience. Instead, when I plopped myself down next to my spouse I was wearing my black “Democracy Dies in Darkness” tee because the football shirt didn’t arrive on time. I tried not to read anything into this, into the fact that the shirt didn’t arrive before the game. It’s not an omen or anything, I told myself.

Other than being inappropriately attired when I watched the Liverpool-Chelsea game on Sunday, what was the big news? The match ended in a 1-1 tie between Chelsea (my 22-year-old son Casey’s favorite) and Liverpool (my nearly-25-year-old twins Abbey and Jonah’s favorite), during which two goals were “disallowed” by officials because players were declared offside after VAR (video assistant referee). Luckily, football’s confusing offside rule had already been thoroughly explained to me by Casey who used popcorn kernels inside a semi-darkened movie theater a few weeks ago before the movie Oppenheimer began to illustrate what offside is. Without this explanation, along with important clarifying details from his girlfriend Jess, I would’ve likely been mystified by watching a Liverpool, then a Chelsea goal nullified on Sunday.

It’s been strange for me, this whole learning process, the fact that everyone in my house knows more about football than me. It’s been quite humbling to have my twentysomething kids — okay, mostly football superfan Casey, who’s been the family contrarian ever since he started speaking (for a short time, the kid rooted for the Yankees simply because the rest of the family rooted for the Red Sox) — teach me not only about the rules of the game, but about the Premier League and the history of some of its best clubs. While Casey hasn’t seemed exactly thrilled that I’ve decided to co-op his football passion and blog about it, he has humored me and been a pretty good teacher, as long as I don’t ask questions while a game is in progress.

During the same weekend when Casey and Jess explained offside to me (I really want to add an “s” to the end of that word, but I’ve been told that’s not how it’s done in the Premier League), they also gave me a general British football 101 primer. Using my cartoon dog notepad, the two sketched out information about the 20-team Premier League which they said represents the best of English football. Its rules and traditions, at first blush, seem odd to me, someone whose preferred sport has been major league baseball ever since I was a little kid. For example, the Premier League doesn’t have playoffs. No playoffs! Its champion is determined by who has the most points.

“Three points are awarded for a win,” the Premier League website says, “one point for a draw and none for a defeat, with the team with the most points at the end of the season winning the Premier League title.” If there are ties, there are myriad ways to further break down the stats to determine a playoff-less winner, like comparing number of goals scored in the season or who scored the most goals when clubs played one another, according to the Sporting News. Thanks to my Ted Lasso viewership, I came to this football project with a very basic understanding of the utterly bizarre concept of “relegation” — where the last three teams in a British league are demoted each year and, conversely, the three with the most points in lower leagues are “promoted” to the next-highest league.

During my first week of watching Premier League games as a Liverpool fan, I learned the difference between shots versus shots on goal quite by accident after I made a throwaway comment to Casey while we were watching the Arsenal and Nottingham Forest match.

“They’ve had a lot of shots on goal,” I said of one team, I don’t remember which. 

“No there haven’t,” replied six-foot-four Casey, his eyes darting back and forth between the screen and his phone, on which he was monitoring Premier League info.

“What do you mean? I just saw them kick the ball at the goal.” I felt like I was being gaslit. Isn’t that what they called it in hockey when teams shoot the puck at the goal? It’s different in football?

“That wasn’t a shot on goal. What is your definition of a shot on goal?”

I didn’t answer him in the moment because I despise being quizzed by the kid who once told me I was an animal abuser for not allowing our dog to eat his dinner at the kitchen table along with the rest of the family. But Casey’s subsequent explanation echoed what I later found online. “A shot on target is either any shot that goes into the goal, a shot that is saved by the goalkeeper or one where the last man blocks the ball,” said the Football Handbook. “In the last two scenarios, the ball must have a clear chance of going into the net.”

I made a mental note not to call a kick in the direction of the net that, say, hits the post, a “shot on target,” just like I made a mental note to refrain from commenting on a goal on the off chance it’s ruled offside. It’s hard enough to be the dumbest person in the room when it came to football, I don’t want to put myself out there to be potentiallly mocked for my ignorance, particularly if Casey, who consumes Premier League information like oxygen, is feeling chippy and wants to give his old mom a hard time.

On the day of the Liverpool-Chelsea match, there’d been ample pregame chatter about the tug-of-war between the two clubs over signing star footballers Moises Caicedo and Romeo Lavia, so I read up on it, scanned sports sites and checked social media so I could participate in any potential discussion. (Spoiler alert: Caicedo and Lavia both went to Chelsea, much to the embarrassment of Liverpool fans.) However, I didn’t find much opportunity to contribute an informed comment during the game. In fact, I found exactly zero opportunities to do so. Instead, opted to keep mostly quiet – sooo unusual for me – and simply took everything in. The fact that the game ended in a tie and neither of my sons who were watching the game with my husband and me were disappointed seemed like a win, at least for peace in my living room.

As I look ahead to week two of my adventure with British football, I’m still waiting for the Liverpool jersey to arrive, am monitoring all the rumors about Liverpool goalkeeper Alisson Becker toying with jumping to the Saudi Pro League, and am trying to get a handle on the fluctuating roster.

Image credit: ESPN/Getty Images.